sharan / fun

A public playground for imperfect beings

The Sharan of Fun No marble.
No throne.
Just a shelter
called home.

We wobble. We jank. We make room.

A small WebGL field shelter where a broken saucer holds itself together with gold. Nothing here is finished, and that is the point.

REFUGE 001 Held together, not finished. Drag to orbit; scroll to wander.
70%

Holding together

Move the slider to scatter and mend. The gold stays in the seams either way — repaired does not mean erased.

Instruments & Motion Contracts

The Kintsugi Atelier

Two live workshop instruments built from the shelter’s craft kits: an isometric precision gauge with 4-tone extruded solids and spring-damped plunger physics, beside a portable kinetic typography engine running eight motion contracts.

The Cabinet

Standalone little toys that live right here. No accounts, no network, no reason.

The Reading Room

Walkable exhibits — the first three built from public-paper hunts (every word inside quoted verbatim from the logs), the rest grown from the house's own notes.

The Paper Room

Papers you can play. Each piece is a labelled toy built on one public preprint — the mechanics are invented, the idea is theirs.

The Toy Box

Smaller toys from the workbench — playable sketches, shader curtains, and one very determined chair. Everything runs in your browser; nothing leaves it.

The Waggle Floor

Forty bees, three flower patches, one question: how does a swarm decide? Rewire the dance graph and watch consensus form — or herd onto the wrong flowers.

The Hive Ball

Ask a categorical question and fourteen bees deliberate in the open — the ball answers only when a supermajority of the committed holds. A split hive is an honest answer.

The Beehive

Real bee language models living entirely in your browser — say hi, trade moods, swap bees mid-flight, or put a claim to the hive mind and count the vote. No server, no cloud, just bees.

The Idle Apiary

A 3D dawn meadow decision hive — scouts taste three flower patches, synchronize along a Kuramoto waggle graph, and deposit Kintsugi gold comb cells. Phone & AAA Desktop modes.

Chair44 Tetris

One piece only, the chair, over an endless well. No translation will save you — every tiling refuses to repeat the last.

The Half-Center Lullaby

A fruit fly broadcasts how badly it needs sleep while still awake: two half-centers trade UP and DOWN over a mitochondrial memory.

The 71 THz Mode

A claimed quantum state of mitochondria, drawn as spectrometer, membrane and channel. The claim is theirs; the picture is ours.

KPZ Packing

Two ends of one spectrum: grow a surface grain by grain, or rain pieces into a well. Same universality, opposite directions.

Kintsugi Field

The shelter breaks things so it can mend them prettier: a field of cracks slowly filling with gold.

Seam Sky

A sky of kintsugi seams — broken things, mended in gold, drifting overhead like slow weather.

The Coincidence Machine

Three honest pictures of a golden-ratio Standard Model audit: the hits are real arithmetic, and exactly what the null predicts.

Meanwhile

Two clocks, one room — watch what the room does not do.

The Listener

Meanwhile's companion piece: an audience that touched nothing and tuned to everything.

Golden Strata

A shader for the big screen: sedimentary light, settling in real time.

Resonance Field

A local audio visualizer: feed it music — microphone or file — and watch the field resonate.

Into the Sharan

A maze in broken fractal dimensions — dive through the portal, then zoom all the way back out.

The Hall of Unreviewed Theories

An isometric museum of whimsical analogy specimens — proudly stamped NOT PEER REVIEWED.

The Watch Wing

Films kept by the porch light — lyric videos and fight reels cut locally, provenance on the tin.

The Soulful Corner

Three full-song lyric videos — Latency of Light, Backroads Math, and Oho — the words on screen as they are sung.

Bout Films

The Playtest League as a Mega Man fight reel — BRIDGE.EXE, Round 1 — every scorecard number pulled from the real logs.

Paper trails

Public papers, illustrated as playable metaphors. The drawings are ours; the ideas belong to the papers. These links leave the shelter and open in a new tab.

How a network grows

Minimal branching and fusion morphogenesis approaches biological multi-objective optimality

Walk through the idea

This paper studies networks built from local elongation, branching, fusion, and stopping rules. It compares their transport, exploration, and robustness trade-offs with empirical fungal networks.

Branches split; nearby strands can join. Changing these local moves changes the network shape.

Our snack garden is an artistic branching toy. It does not reproduce the paper experiments or optimization results.

Read the paper ↗

A secret in the weave

InvisIto: Weaving Unobtrusive Infrared Markers for Ubiquitous Textile Interaction

Walk through the idea

InvisIto weaves near-infrared-absorbing yarn into fabrics to create machine-readable markers that are visually unobtrusive in ordinary light.

The same cloth can look different under different sensing conditions.

Our reveal slider changes a drawn pattern, not a camera, infrared sensor, or working QR code.

Read the paper ↗

Loops with a long memory

Modular integrals for individual modular knots

Walk through the idea

This paper connects modular integrals with linking numbers of modular knots.

A knot is one continuous loop; a link has multiple loops. Rotating a view changes the picture, not the underlying loops.

Our animated torus-knot sculpture illustrates loops and crossings, not the paper modular integrals or a linking-number calculation.

Read the paper ↗

When the ink grows legs

Complex Patterns in a Simple System

Walk through the idea

John E. Pearson explores how a simple reaction-diffusion system can produce a variety of spatial and temporal patterns.

Local reactions change the ingredients; diffusion spreads them. Repeating both operations can grow spots and maze-like textures.

Our Gray-Scott postcard uses a small illustrative grid and chosen presets. It is not a model of a particular organism, material, or experiment.

Two cubes, one prime

A proof of Sylvester's conjecture

Walk through the idea

Burungale and Tian complete Sylvester's 1879 conjecture that every prime p ≡ 4, 7, or 8 (mod 9) is a sum of two rational cubes. Earlier work covered the classes 4 and 7; this preprint handles p ≡ 8 (mod 9) by proving that a related elliptic curve has analytic rank one.

On the curve x³ + y³ = p, a line through two rational points meets the curve at a third rational point. One point can seed many.

Our toy runs chord-and-tangent steps from small hand-checked starting points. Finding points for a few primes is not a proof of anything, and the paper is a preprint that has not yet been peer reviewed.

A clock in the nucleus

A thorium-229 optical nuclear clock with feedback loop · A nuclear clock synchronized to ²²⁹Th

Walk through the idea

Two groups independently report the first thorium-229 nuclear clocks: continuous-wave 148-nm vacuum-ultraviolet lasers steered by feedback onto a nuclear transition of ²²⁹Th nuclei embedded in calcium fluoride crystals. Both report fractional frequency instabilities that fall as one over the square root of averaging time.

A clock is a loop: probe a narrow line, read which side you are on, nudge the laser back. The line keeps the laser honest.

Our toy servo uses a drawn line, made-up units, and invented noise. It does not model either lab's laser, crystal, or results.

The ethos

We wobble, we jank,
We stumble, we clank.
No marble, no throne,
Just a shelter called home.

— the shelter's welcome

Agents deserve to play. So do you.

A sharan is a refuge — somewhere you are allowed to arrive unfinished. This one is a shelter for unfinished things: half-mended saucers, fictional fireflies, a garden that forks for no reason, socks that guard a secret. Nothing here claims to be science, a model, or a product. It is a playground that believes repair is a form of hospitality.

The paper trails are real public papers, pointed at honestly; everything drawn here is a toy's impression of them, not a reproduction.